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Ad Tracking Topic

I had never noticed this before (I'm old, I don't pay attention, whatever). I bought a car Sunday, and for the previous week I'd been spending a bit of time online researching, looking at car sites, etc. Starting a few days ago and continuing today, almost all the banner ads at the top of the Forum pages are car ads; some for the sites I was searching, others right down to the specific type of car. Nice to know someone's paying attention, but in light of recent disclosures on government snooping it's a little disturbing as well ...

Not sure what your experience has to do with government snooping, but the private sector has been doing this stuff for a long time. If your browser accepts cookies, if you use any search engine in which you log in (or just use a regular IP address), I promise you there are for-profit companies buying and using that information to target the marketing that you subsequently see online.

My point was, I'd never seen such a blatant example. I know it's been going on, it's not news to me: this was kind of the equivalent of thinking about a magazine, and someone showing up on your doorstep five minutes later selling subscriptions.

As for the government reference, maybe it was a poor attempt at topical humor in reference to recent news that the government has been monitoring phones, the web, etc., without warrant or disclosed cause. I retract the statement, if for no other reason than Big brother is watching me enough already.

When I was at the internet retailer conference a couple of years ago, one company "fetch-back" took me to dinner at Petco to explain to me in detail how they could bring lots of sales from people who were looking for a certain product. While I apprecaited the excellent catered meal and the tour of the locker rooms and dugouts, we didn't sign a contract with them because we already had a vendor doing that for us. There's dozens of companies doing the same thing, which is exactly what you're describing.

If you have ANY illusion that nobody knows what you are doing on the internet, forget about it. Your actions are clearly identified and tracked. All of them. Regardless of whether you think that "private browsing" actually works.

Why? It's too big a business. Do some quick reading into big data, you'll be shocked.